We’ve just finished a new ECOutlet documentary…this time it’s about one of our favourite eco inventors, Andy the glass maker, who makes our recycled glasses out of old bottles. You can check out the video in small format over on the top right hand side or bigger style on the ECOutlet Youtube channel.
All of Andy’s innovative glasses are available from the recycled glassware section on ECOutlet.
A Very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all our customers.
Paul & Marco
ECOutlet
For Londoners and anyone else visiting the capital on the weekend of Dec 13th and 14th please come along and pay a visit to this year’s Eco Design Christmas Fair which is taking place for the first time at the Boiler House in the Old Truman Brewery on Brick Lane.
Now in its fifth year, the Eco Design Fair brings together a collection of designers and small businesses whose work is centred on sustainability and kindness to the environment.
We’ll be there with a stall on the Saturday and Sunday so pop along and say hello if you’re a customer. We’ll be bringing along lots of Christmas gift ideas and alongside us will be loads of other small traders with plenty of unique and unusual eco goodies to check out.
This week marks Global Entrepreneurship Week and to coincide with the event, the entrepreneurial organisation, Striding Out have just released the Future 100 list of Young Ethical Entrepreneurs. At a mere 35 years old, I’m very happy to say I just about managed to squeeze myself onto this list…hurray!
The Future 100 aims to showcase businesses that offer innovative and sustainable solutions to social problems and rewards ethical business practice and social responsibility. After a few months of quiet manic work here behind the scenes it’s really nice to receive a little recognition for the business model we have in place here at ECOutlet and it’s great to be listed amongst so many other inspirational small businesses.
For regular visitors to ECOutlet, you might spot a few of our friends and suppliers also on the list such as Rose from Green Knickers who makes us our Padded Cycling Knickers. Simon Nash, the inventor of Green Oil, the bicycle chain lube and Marc D’eath who set up and runs Sustained Magazine are also included. Well done everyone and for a full list of winners check out the Future 100 list.
Visitors to our kids section may be familiar with the Paint Your Own T-Shirt and Make Hats activity packs which we added to the site towards the end of last year. These arts and crafts projects have been designed by an old friend of ECOutlet’s, Kerri Sellens.
Kerri went to art college with Marco, my co-founder so we’ve all been friends for a long time now and last week we were delighted to hear from Kerri that one of the packs in her range, the Rainy Day Box had been awarded the overall winner in the Practical Pre-School Awards 2008 Toys and Games Category.
This is an amazing result considering it’s less than a year since Kerri took the plunge with her own business and shows how with some creative thinking and hard work good things can happen.
The Rainy Day box is now available to purchase from our kids section where you can find more details on the contents. We love Creative Charlie’s range not just because our clever friend makes them but because they stimulate engagement, co-operation and creativity in young children and have been designed with the environment in mind containing wherever possible recycled and reusable materials.
Don’t just take our word for it though, here’s what the testers at the Practical Pre-School Awards had to say about the Rainy Day Box:
The children loved following the work sheets and began to implement ideas of their own into their creations. Its value as a creative resource is immense and it incorporates flexible and enjoyable activities, as well as helping to teach children about the environment.
Everything in the box was great. The Rainy Day Box had a charming sense of simplicity and my five-year-old was able to use it independently as well as being encouraged to play co-operatively and share. It has fantastic educational value and appealed to children throughout the trial. Adaptable, original and a lot of fun!
We’ve just added Ethical Living to the range of eco and green lifestyle magazines you can subscribe to via the website and to celebrate we have 5 x 1 year’s subscriptions of this stylish publication on offer to our to ECOutlet newsletter subscribers and blog readers.
All you have to do to be in with a chance of having the next six issues of Ethical Living delivered directly to your home free of charge is send us an email at info@ecoutlet.co.uk with Ethical Living in the subject line and tell us what your favourite magazine(s) is to read. It’s that simple!
Ethical Living is printed every two months and provides you with all the information you need to make a positive difference to the world around you.
As well as thought-provoking features on environmental and social concerns, each issue of Ethical Living is crammed with inspirational features on fashion and beauty as well as regular articles on travel, finance, homes and gardens, food and drink, health and family life. Every subscription also comes with a free gift which differs depending on the current subscription offer!
Good luck everyone!!
Please Note: Competition is open to UK residents only and closes on August 21st. Winners will be notified by email after the closing date.
We’ve been busy adding lots of new products to the range over the past month or so but one range which we’re particularly keen to promote comes from the new campaign Tap.
In the past we’ve written about the silly practice of buying bottled water which has traveled hundreds or thousands of miles to the UK and how damaging this is to the environment. We even made a video about it. But now there is an alternative for bottled water lovers everywhere in the shape of Tap.
Tap is a new ethical enterprise taking on the bottled water industry. It is a campaign and fundraising initiative committed to getting people to re-think bottled water through a range of clever little products designed to make drinking tap water fashionable, easy and safe.
Just to recap, Tap water in the UK is one of the highest quality tap waters in the world. Testing by the Drinking Water Inspectorate in 2006 reported that 99.96% of 4.5 million samples tested passed water quality sampling. In blind taste tests most people can’t tell the difference between tap and bottled water. Tap even carried out their own survey on London’s South Bank and from a pool of 250 people 84% failed to identify tap water.
The products in the tap range have been designed to promote a sustainable lifestyle that gets people to re-use and recycle. The Do It Yourself Water Pack includes 10 labels to encourage drinkers to re-use their water bottle 10 times before recycling which would result in saving 100 bottles of water. The other item in the range is a sleekly designed re-usable water bottle which has been designed to last for years rather than thrown away.
All the products carry the message that Tap water is just as good as the imported stuff and with 70% of the profits from the campaign going towards water and sanitation projects in the developing world, we’re 100% behind this campaign which will hopefully do for bottled water what Anya Hyndmarch did for plastic bags.
Sorry, excuse the pun but cutting a tyre in half made my arms go all wobbly and took three hours to finish! Little did I know (probably as I’ve never had a car) that tyres are held together with very very thick wire!
Yes, this is ECOutlet’s latest quest to bring you innovative new products which help reduce our impact on landfill.
My local garage had a stack of tyres outside which were destined for the dump and kindly donated one so we’ve been wearing our thinking caps today and seeing how we could recycle them. We’re only at the experimental stage right now but stay tuned as we plan to keep you updated on our wheely good work!
For the adventurous and self-sufficient out there, I found this useful link on how to make sandals out of old tyres and for a wealth of other ideas, the ever useful How can I recycle this? has a list of suggestions from users on how to reuse old tyres.
We had some happy news last week on finding out that ECOutlet has been short-listed in our local borough of Islington’s upcoming Giant Green Awards.
Looking at the range of nominees you’d be forgiven for thinking Islington covered a much bigger area (it’s only 6 square miles!) with familiar names on the green scene such as the Duke of Cambridge Pub, green taxi firm Ecoigo and trailblazing wholefood shop Unpackaged all up for potential awards.
In our own category, Green Champion, we’re short-listed with eight other nominees including Bere Architects who already have a mantle of trophies having won the Eco House of the Year at the 2007 Grand Designs Expo as well as Small House of the Year in the British Homes Awards 2007 for the stunning, energy efficient Focus House they designed last year.
The presentation is next Monday so we’ll let you know how we get on, whatever the outcome it’s nice to be short-listed amongst such good company.
June update: Well no prizes for ECOutlet at the Giant Green awards in Islington last month but we did have a very nice time indeed and after some free champagne (paid for by the sponsors) we went home with smiles on our faces! A full list of winners is up on the Islington Council website, the winner in our category was A Chest of Drawers, a local furniture shop with the UK’s first ethical and environmental label for furniture. Worthy winners we thinks!
Back in February we marked our first year in business and the first year of the eco points scheme. Since the launch our customers have been collecting eco points with every purchase and for every 100 points collected we’ve promised to donate £2.50 to a UK based environmental charity.
So now our first year in business has drawn to a close, we’re pleased to announce that last years donation recently went to Trees for Cities, an independent charity working with local communities on tree-planting and landscaping projects. Their aim is to tackle global warming, create social cohesion and beautify our cities through tree planting, community education and training initiatives in urban areas of greatest interest.
The money donated from the eco points scheme was ear-marked by the charity to go towards purchasing plants for a recent planting scheme in Kennington Park, South London. The plants will help make up a wildlife area in the park featuring wildlife friendly shrubby species such as hawthron, blackthorn, dog rose and other native plants and all plants will be allowed to grow in a more natural state in order to provide shelter for local wildlife.
The project will also involve local schools and create a permanent outdoor education area for children to use both as part of formal school scession and on their own at weekends or holidays when in the park. We’re particularly pleased to be helping out a project which involves a younger generation and creates a resource which can be used for educational purposes. It’s a great start to the eco points scheme and we’d just like to take this opportunity to thank all our customers for their support and for making the donation possible.
